2009/02/25

what sort of game idea you're looking for
A puzzle that dont looks like a tetris variation, something like gimme friction

what your goals are in making this game
To make cool game ;)
I mean, it would be a puzzle very very simple to learn but the things that are going make the game more complex came from the movements of the player, not from a level pre designed

your abilities in game design, programming, art, and sound
This game is not suposed to have sounds, i dont like sounds.
Also, im not good with phisics engines, so no advanced phisics or falling blocks

your preferences in game design, programming, art, and sound
Anything but sounds.

The idea: Pique

In short, this idea is a Minesweeper-like puzzle game about the processes of evolutionary search. Your goal in each level is to find the highest peak of an invisible height map, by taking peeks at one spot at a time.

a height map...

At the beginning of each randomly generated level, you are presented with a blank and unknown map, a grid waiting to be filled in. It is like Minesweeper, but instead of randomly placed mines, there is a hidden landscape of peaks and valleys to chart and uncover. Your goal is to locate the highest Peak. You start by clicking a spot on the map to place a Peek, revealing the height of the landscape at that point. Placing several Peeks would allow you to have a rough idea of what the landscape looks like. The challenge is essentially in inferring the shape of the terrain based on limited information, as fast as possible and with as few moves as possible.

Now this could be the entire game. In fact, I'd encourage you to start by just getting this basic system up and running, and see if it's fun. I don't know. It might be fun, or it might not. I suspect a lot of the fun at this stage would depend on the particular algorithm you use to randomly generate the height map.

There's a bit more to the game though. This is supposed to be about evolutionary search, remember? Here, the player takes the role of evolution in the search for the high peak in a fitness landscape. Each point in the landscape represents a simple genome, and the height represents its fitness. Let's give the player a few extra tools to help them out. The two most basic tools used by any evolutionary algorithm are mutation and crossover. So, let the player use them.

Here's how it would work. You start off with a limited number of Peeks at your disposal. When you place a Peek, in addition to revealing the height on the map, you get some amount of money proportional to the height you just found. You can then spend that money to use your special abilities. One ability would be Mutation. You select the Mutation ability and click on a Peek that's already on the map. Then a handful of new Peeks pop up around it, scattered randomly within a short radius like mushroom spores. Money from these new Peeks would be added to your total, as usual. Some testing would be necessary to ensure that the cost of a mutation is balanced with the likely payoff.

Crossover is the other basic action. You'd select two existing Peeks on the map, and several new Peeks would pop up somewhere in the line between the two. Just like Mutation, it would cost some amount to use, and each of the Peeks created by it would earn you money based on their height.

The controls for this could actually be very minimal. Click an empty space to place a new Peek. Click an existing Peek for a mutation, and drag from one Peek to another for a crossover. Though you'd have to be sure that you give plenty of information by the cursor icon and text. If you mouse over an existing Peek, it should tell you clearly that this is a Mutation, and how much it will cost, and in what radius the new Peeks will be distributed. If you start dragging, it should tell you that you are starting a Crossover, and how much it will cost. You'll need to introduce each new tool through the introductory levels. It might be better to have a toolbar on the side where you can select Peek, Mutation, or Crossover explicitly, with some explanatory text that comes up when you mouse over them. Otherwise the players might not realize what options are available to them.

Once the player finds the highest Peak, the level is won. It would be nice to then reveal the landscape with some sort of nice 3D rendering, perhaps using ray casting.

In short, this idea is physics-based platformer (like Gish) with graphics consisting of photographs of food from restaurant advertisements (kind of like And Yet It Moves except with food). That's right. I'll start with the first part.

First of all, you must play Gish if you haven't already. There's a demo. Play it. If for some reason you cannot download and install the game right now, at least watch this excellent design tour video to get an idea of what it's about.

So, now that you understand why it would be desirable to make a physics-based platformer, like Gish, in Flash, we may turn our attention to how. The blob of tar that stars as your avatar in Gish is a mass-spring system consisting of a large number of particles, too many for our poor, overworked Flash Player to reasonably handle. So, for our character, we will use the smallest mass-spring system possible - that is, three particles connected into a triangle. That, as luck would have it, is precisely the shape of a corn chip (or if you prefer, tortilla chip). Thus, our character is a corn chip. With a face, of course.

Here is how our corn chip moves: rotate left and right with the arrow keys (to roll along the ground) and compress into a very short triangle (and make a cute scrunched-up face) when the space bar is held down. Release the space bar and the corn chip jumps. If you want to get a feel for how this would work, try this suspiciously similar physics demo and hold down the left and right arrow keys at the same time, then release them. To get a feel for how the rolling along the ground movement would work, try this other physics demo. Not quite the same, but enough to show that it works.

Here is how our corn chip fights: (there's gotta be fighting, right?) corners are deadly, edges are vulnerable. Pretty simple. Mario can land on a Goomba anywhere as long as he's going down, but our corn chip has to land on a corner. Perhaps some corners are more powerful than others. Anyway, here you've got the basics for a vaguely Gish-ish platformer, where our triangular hero may jump and tumble around a playground of platforms, massacre entire species of innocent food items, collect salsa or something and rescue his girlfriend. Whatever. You are free to flesh out the story and actual gameplay as your inspiration takes you.

Here is how our corn chip is rendered: three lineTo() commands and a beginBitmapFill() with a photographic corn chip texture. You could even crop a rectangular piece out of this image and just use that for the texture bitmap. Anyway, the point is that everything in this game is made of food (or rather, images of food). And not just any food, but that hyper-real, airbrushed food that seems only to exist in advertisements for big restaurant chains. You want the player to be drowning in saliva after just a few minutes of playing this game. Frolicking among rolling hills of crispy bacon glistening with cholesterol, leaping from atop gloriously shiny apples to land on a golden-crusted loaf of artisan bread, obliterating a hostile crowd of sentient jello cubes... There are so many possibilities.

2009/02/18

what sort of game idea you're looking for
A platformer that has a different element then the normal platformer or a creative twist on current platformer elements

what your goals are in making this game
To create my first great game, as so far all my ideas have been not so good and I end up stop making them before they are even finished.

what games you've made already
A racing game, fighting game, text based RPG, 3x Unfinished platformers, Destructible Landscape engine, a few avoiders.

your favorite Flash games
I love RPG games and platformers

your abilities in game design, programming, art, and sound
I have trouble designing games thats why I need your help =), programming i'm getting alright at now (waye sent me sourcecode of his to study :P). Art I am not really sure because I leave it till last and they are usually rushed , and sound I either make my own or buy a license.

your preferences in game design, programming, art, and sound
programming

This idea came about when I watched the trailer for The Unfinished Swan and thought, "Hmm, I should try doing that in 2D." In short the idea is a 2D maze game in the form of a platformer beat-em-up (like Rage 3). Here's the twist: like in The Unfinished Swan, the playing field is completely and undifferentiatedly white, glowing like the Matrix with full-spectrum light, infinite possibilities. Where are the walls and ceilings and floors? How do you find the right path? Here's how: the blood of your enemies. A continual stream of baddies comes in through the maze to attack you, and the resulting bloodstains (theirs, of course) outline the topography of the level. You want to coordinate your perhaps physics-based attacks to direct the particle sprays of blood into the most illuminating positions. It would look remarkably similar to this animation.

The goal could be to get to the end of the maze, as quickly as possible. Extra points through skillful combat, collectable powerups, and acquirable upgrades could certainly come into play. If you could come up with a way to procedurally generate the mazes that would be cool too. I imagine you'd want to have a scrolling tilemap with support for angled surfaces like in N, but the idea would still work with just a single-screen map and only square tiles. Likewise, it would not be necessary for the combat to be complex or physics-based, but some way to direct the sprays of blood would be necessary (at the least with a forward, upward, and downward attack). I'd be glad to advise you on the art direction or design of the game. Let me know. :)

This is a game born of hatred. Or at least disdain, for the legions of Crayon Physics clones that have so shamelessly made their success, most notably Magic Pen. So, the player starts up Paint Physics, anticipating perhaps some delightful fluid dynamics and colorful creative fun with paint. They are soon dismayed to see that this apparent Crayon Physics clone does not take fingerpaint as its nostalgia-inducing motif of choice, but that the Paint here is in fact MS Paint, the maligned instrument of art noobs and of course, Satan. The word for today is anti-aesthetic. Clicking the inexpertly scrawled play button, they are greeted with the sight of a familiar blue ball and yellow star, rendered in MS Paint's distinctive style. Oh, how cute - the mouse cursor looks like the pencil tool from MS Paint. A line of text at the top, artfully displayed in an aliased Times New Roman font, suggests to the player that they use their mouse to trace around the dashed outline of a square placed above the blue ball.

Here is where the fun begins. The player dutifully proceeds to trace a line around the shape, and there it is - a messy but passable square hovering in the air above the blue ball. Now, will this shape suddenly solidify and fall to the ground with a graceful crash, nudging the blue ball delicately toward the waiting yellow star? The player releases the mouse button, expectantly. Nothing at first, but then, slowly, this squiggly outline begins to peel away like a wet noodle thrown on a wall, until the whole thing collapses into a limp, tangled heap on top of the ball. Oh dear. The player mouses over to investigate. Oh look, the cursor changes to a drag icon when the mouse is over the blue ball. Can you drag the ball? The player drags the ball around, and shakes off the ropes. Drag to yellow star - level complete!

Now, if this were the whole game, it might be somewhat amusing as a parody but not really worth all the work necessary to develop it. Fortunately, that's not the game. It's just the intro. The true game would be a physics-based mouse avoider combined with a physics construction toy. Given that the basic action is to drag a blue ball all the way to a yellow star in order to beat each level, you've got a lot of options for mouse avoider obstacles and puzzles right there. And given that you'd be using a physics engine like Box2DFlash or similar, there are lots of creative physics-based ways you could take this without having to simply imitate an existing avoider game. But anyway, let's just say that certain shapes, as well as perhaps more actively swarming enemies will result in you losing the level if the blue ball touches them. Let's say that these are all the red shapes. Well, how might the player ease their way through the hazards that lie in wait, using the humble limp noodle pencil tool that is their sole accessory?

Having the ability to create flexible, perhaps stretchy, ropes is more useful than you might think. If you draw a rope with either end inside an existing object. like a floating platform or a box sitting on the ground, the end of the rope will stay attached to it. If you draw a rope from the blue ball to, say, a heavy black box, then all of a sudden you've got a weapon against your reddish attackers - pick up the ball and starting bashing them away with the heavy black box, a la Hammerfall. Basically, you use the stretchy ropes to connect the objects that already exist in the level, rather than drawing your own. I haven't seen this mechanic used anywhere yet. But if you really feel like the player must be able to add shapes of their own, I guess you could also make use of MS Paint's circle and rectangle tools, or even the others if you can figure out how. ;) Either way, I imagine that level design and testing would take up most of the development time of this game, at least if you're using an existing physics engine like you should. The success of Paint Physics will hinge entirely on its level design.

You know tower defense games. They take one aspect of real-time strategy - base building - and extrapolate it out into a full game. Base building is fun, but why don't we try taking another component of real-time strategy gameplay and turn that into a game? Something kind of opposite and complementary to tower defense, maybe... I know - how about the part where you command a squadron of soldiers to invade an enemy base? But there has to be a little more than that - after all, we've see that sort of thing before. How about this - have you ever played Age Empires? In the first level of the Babylonian campaign, Holy Man, you start out commanding a single, vulnerable priest unit on the edge of an enemy village. Priests convert enemy units to your side. So in order to build up your army, you must sneakily convert units from the enemy base, penetrating further into their defenses as your squad grows, and being exposed to stronger and stronger enemy units. Sound fun? That's the basic idea behind Monk Tactics.

In short, the concept is abstract top-down shooter (like Geometry Wars) exploring the dynamics of evolution by sexual selection. Uh, yeah. If the game Coil offends you, don't read the rest of this. ;) But really, this is meant to be as clean and abstract as possible while retaining the core of the evolutionary dynamics that occur between the two sexes of a species.

There are two types of creatures in the world: males and females. Males look like triangles, like the outline of a slice of pizza that's been cut into eight or twelve slices. The pointy end is forward, as in Asteroids, and the males shoot from the pointy end (hence the shooting-ness of this game). Playing as a male, your creature would rotate to point toward the mouse cursor and accelerate toward it if the mouse button is not pressed. Pressing the mouse button would both put on the brakes to slow down your creature, as well as shoot bullets like a normal shooting. Females look like a pizza or stop sign with a slice taken out of it (so a male and female together would make a single circle or octagon). The opening is forward, which rotates to point toward the mouse cursor and accelerates very slowly toward it if the mouse button is not pressed. Much like in the game flOw, pressing the button accelerates the creature toward the cursor somewhat faster, rather than shooting.

The point of the game is to accumulate as many offspring as possible. Gameplay occurs in timed rounds, for each generation. For the first round, you can choose your creature from a small random set of individuals. All your offspring that survive to the end of the round are added to your total score, and one of them is chosen randomly to be your creature in the next round. This motivates you to choose your mates a bit more carefully, to ensure that you are not stuck with a sickly and weak creature in the next round. And of course, it forces you to experience the game from both the female and male perspectives. During a round, your creature could be colored blue, other creatures in red, and your juvenile offspring in purple, perhaps. There would need to be at least three colors, anyway - maybe you can come up with a better scheme. :p

Creatures can attack each other. Females are larger and stronger than males, though less nimble, so they attack by ramming (avoiding the opening, which is not armored). Females cannot shoot. Males can ram too, but they are smaller and usually just shoot to attack. As you may have suspected however, bullets serve a dual purpose. If the bullet is shot into the opening (the missing slice) of a female, there is a chance that the female will be impregnated. If this occurs, a baby creature is formed from the genetic material of its two parents, plus a mutation or two. As in the game Cultivation, the new creature gestates for some amount of time (more than a few seconds, less than a minute) inside its mother before it is born and takes its place in the world as a nonreproductive juvenile creature. A pregnant female is slower and more vulnerable than normal.

There is also food in the world, in the form of small squares that spin across the screen like in Evolites. Creatures can eat food by touching it, which they must do every so often to keep their energy meters high. These energy meters drain very slowly over time (faster during pregnancy) and also serve as a creature's heath bar when shot or rammed. When it reaches zero, the creature dies. All these physical properties of the creatures, like energy meter size, draining speed, armor strength, body size, acceleration rate, maximum speed, fire rate, bullet speed, bullet size, fertility, gestation time, would be variables in the genome of each creature.

So we have here a minimal but quite expressive system in which many interesting evolutionary dynamics may emerge. The problem is that in order to take advantage of it, the creatures must have some quite sophisticated behavioral AI that also can be encoded within their genome, or you must design a multiplayer game in which human brains take the place of evolution in exploring the strategic space. I have some ideas toward a solution but nothing completely defined. If you are sufficiently interested I would be glad to elaborate on how this system could be turned into an actual game. :)

your favorite Flash games
Games that entertain me from the beginning, and possess a consistent style. The gameplay element of "shooting"

your abilities in game design, programming, art, and sound
Game design = %60, Programming = %80, Art = %60, Sound = %50, in terms of how well I am with them

your preferences in game design, programming, art, and sound
Prefer making a game involving coding. I prefer to avoid animation/sound/art as a required part of the main gameplay. I also would like to avoid physics based games for coding purposes.

In short, the concept is top-down arena shooter plus match-three bubble popper (like Puzzle Bobble). Instead of shooting normal bullets, you shoot colored balls that stick to your opponents and accumulate Katamari-style on their bodies. When a ball hits, if it creates a group of three or more adjacent balls of the same color, those balls explode, dealing damage to the opponent they're attached to. Any balls that get detached are then sucked back toward that opponent so that they reattach, possibly setting off more explosions that do even more damage. The strategy of setting up combos of explosions just from one shot is exactly the gameplay of most match-three casual games, motivated by impressive score multipliers (in this case damage multipliers) for each subsequent explosion in the chain reaction.

I had originally imagined this as a simple multiplayer arena game, where each player is running around with a bunch of colored balls on their back, trying to trigger explosions on the other players while avoiding getting shot themselves. However, I think it could work equally well as a single player game, with waves of different types of enemies, and bosses and such. Enemies could vary in their base body shapes, resistance to certain colors of balls, shooting pattern and bullet type, movement pattern and speed, and of course the basics like health and armor. Bosses might be able to shake off or clear balls from their bodies, in addition being bigger and stronger and having more advanced AI. Hey, if you want, you could even have the enemies evolve in a simple genetic algorithm-ish way, since you're interested in evolution. Let me know if you want ideas on that.

I can imagine lots of possibilities for powerups, special abilities and upgrades. The concept is pretty easily extensible, and would be compatible with most special abilities found in normal shooting games. One simple variation I'd add to the player's arsenal is the ability to lay down balls like mines, instead of just shooting them, which would attach to whatever runs into them and possibly trigger an explosion like a normal bullet ball. There's also the question of whether the ball bullets bounce off walls and objects or whether they'd stick. Maybe certain objects would be sticky, or instead maybe certain weapons would shoot bouncy balls. There's also the question of how ball color is determined. If it's like most match-three games, the color of the next ball would be randomly chosen, displayed prominently perhaps at the end of the player's gun. Often, the color of the second ball is also shown, to help the player plan ahead, and also so that there can be a special button that will swap the current and next ball color. If you'd like to go with this idea, I'd recommend downloading and trying out a bunch of free demos of casual games in the match-three genre. Let me know if you want recommendations.

2009/02/03

Early in January, I created The Game Idea Giveaway Thread on the MochiAds community forums. Since then, I've been pleasantly surprised at the amount of encouragement and interest that this endeavor has attracted. I thought I'd start publishing the ideas here on my blog as well, to bring them to a wider audience.

I recently decided to write a list of all the Flash game ideas I've thought of over the past few years. I was somewhat alarmed to find that I had a frighteningly large number of them - close to one hundred distinct ideas, some good, some bad - and realized that I'd never have time to make them all. So, I went about putting the games into various categories in order to prioritize and figure out which ideas are most important to me and which I don't really care about so much. I ended up with maybe 45 ideas that are special to me, plus a couple from other people I'm collaborating with.

That leaves me with around 50 ideas that I most likely will never make. I've decided that I'd like to start giving them away to game developers in need. If you're a developer who needs an idea, this is the place to post your request. Tell me what you're looking for and I'll see if I have a game concept that fits your need. And if any other developers would like to join in and contribute their own ideas to the pool, that would be great too.

I'm doing this because I'd hate to see all these ideas go to waste. And if I can help some people out by giving these ideas away for free, great. Just to be absolutely clear, I don't want money for this, but I do ask that if you use an idea that I give you, please have a credits page in your game and put "axcho" in it somewhere. Somewhere visible, preferably. ;)

Instructions

Looking for a game idea that you can implement, modify, or just be inspired by? Let me know and I'll do my best to provide you with the concept that's right for you.

If you want me to send you a game idea, please tell me...

what sort of game idea you're looking for

what your goals are in making this game

what games you've made already

your favorite Flash games

your abilities in game design, programming, art, and sound

your preferences in game design, programming, art, and sound

The more specific you are in describing what you want, the easier it will be for me to help you. In particular, it would be very helpful if you could let me know how comfortable you are developing with multiplayer, physics-based, music-based, and 3D gameplay.

Update:
The Game Idea Giveaway Thread is currently closed to new requests! I'll consider opening it up again once I've finished filling all the existing requests.